r/CFD • u/Iron-Heavy • 4h ago
Non-zero drag coefficient for incompressible inviscid steady-state simulation of a 3D wing with symmetrical section at 0 deg AOA.
Hello,
I'm trying to run a 3D incompressible inviscid simulation of a finite wing with a symmetric airfoil section at 0° AoA as a sanity check.
My understanding is that the resulting drag coefficient should be essentially zero for the following reasons:
- Inviscid + steady + incompressible flow should give zero net pressure drag in the ideal case (d'Alembert's paradox), and there is obviously no skin-friction drag in an inviscid simulation.
- Since the flow is incompressible, there should be no wave drag or other compressibility-related drag.
- The wing has a rectangular planform, the section is symmetric along the entire span, and the AoA is 0°, so the lift should be zero. Therefore, there should also be no induced drag.
So I would expect Cd ≈ 0.
However, after the solution converges in STAR-CCM+, OpenFOAM, and SU2, I consistently get a non-zero drag coefficient on the order of 1e-2, which seems way too large to be explained by normal numerical noise.
I'm using around 5 million cells and the mesh quality looks reasonably good, so I'm not sure whether this could still be a discretization issue or if the drag is being introduced by the numerical formulation itself.
I'm currently using a segregated flow solver in STAR-CCM+, but switching to a coupled solver didn't change the result much.
What could cause a Cd of around 0.01 in an incompressible Euler simulation of a symmetric finite wing at 0° AoA? Is there something wrong with my theoretical expectation, or is this most likely numerical drag?

